By Bolaji Ojo
What’s at stake:
The electronics industry has always been consumed by the search for the “next big thing,” that huge design, product or new market that would create massive revenue and profits for the first group of companies to release it. The supply chain that brings these “breakthroughs” to the market is not typically in the limelight. Until now. Look no further than just announced European Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a Dresden-based new foundry led byTSMC, joined by Bosch, Infineon and NXP. Another example is a brand new RISC-V JV, equally shared among NXP, Infineon, Qualcomm, Bosch and Nordic, unveiled late last week. For the foreseeable future, creating effective supply chains via partnerships will be the industry’s greatest passion. Pay attention.
In the world of electronics, the design engineer is a demi-god.
He (usually a man but, thank goodness, increasingly less so nowadays), designs, throws his creation over the wall and everyone else scrambles to bring it to production and sell to customers. The only engineers who get involved in the post-design processes are typically those who moved into management, sales positions and components engineers.
This is a worn process. The industry goes through it daily, thousands of times, and all over the world. Which makes engineers believe they rule the roost.